"Black cats and goblins and broomsticks and ghosts. Covens of witches with all of their hopes. you may think they scare me. You're probably right. Black cats and goblins on Halloween night..."

Not many films capture the pure essence of the eponymous holiday, the night of mischief and tricks, demons and imps and ghouls better than John Carpenter’s 1978 film, Halloween. From the quaint neighborhoods that could most certainly be our own and the dutiful rakers and lawnmowers and cross guards there, to the revelers garbed against the night, unaware that a truly ghastly soul walks among them in the autumn air. Halloween brings evil to our front lawns, raps on the front door with ferocious vigor at the very moment when we’re supposed to be safest from it all. It makes the entire day spooky and unsettling, not just the night and what we don’t see there.

Halloween centers on the sociopathic Michael Myers, a man who knows no emotion, no remorse, and no guilt, but only the utter carnality of evil. Immediately, Carpenter tells us this; in the first minutes we’re introduced to a boy who has just murdered his older sister in cold blood. If he’s capable of such as a child, our minds inexorably run to the urgency of what he could be capable of as an adult. And it doesn’t take too long to get an idea: he escapes from a mental asylum and runs back to his home town, where he killed his sister 15 years ago, and where he’ll kill again on this Halloween night.

When Laurie Strode, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, first encounters Michael Myers, he’s standing across the street from her school. She’s straightaway unnerved, caught off balance by the odd sensation of having a masked man stare at her, having him seemingly gawk at her. And Michael just stands there, stolid, preternaturally. It’s an important scene not only because of the visceral connection between these two bodies, but also because of the in class discussion on fate. Through a simple plot device, the entire narrative is beautifully foreshadowed, the theme is thrust front and center: destiny is inescapable. Even as two bodies are not logically connected, they are somehow connected through the natural element of fate. If Laurie had never taken that key to the Myer’s house, the common thematic thread would have never been connected, her friends would have never been killed, and she would have never been set on the ghastly road of events that would see her battling Michael several more times before his utter destruction years - and alternate timelines - later. Fate, like Michael, is immovable.

And like Michael and fate, the haunting score never changes, never moves. It’s constant, incessantly prodding our minds and reminding us something’s going to happen, that eventually the tenuous suspense so expertly crescendoed will finally manifest in an explosion of terror, emotion, and relief. Again and again and again just like Michael, that now infamous score never stops coming back. It just all works so surprisingly well for its utter and beautiful simplicity.

For the longest time after his escape from the mental asylum, we rarely see Michael’s face, and if we ever do, it’s from some far distance. This keeps Michael enigmatic, ferocious, something unknown and therefore dangerous. Michael becomes this disembodied, omniscient presence; he holds no identity outside of his actions, the actions of a detached murderer, one whose inability to collate his mind beyond psychosis makes him more animal than man.

Always masked even when killing, Michael represents not only the detached nature of insanity, but more importantly, he represents our need to separate our infantile sense of insecurity from our infantile rage. Michael is the insurmountable Other, he is the Bogeyman, the Bump in the night that we are terrified to confront. His mask sets him as so, it sets him apart from us because it is abnormal. But his mask also represents the burying of our infantile rage, the buried resentment for our repressed desires, desires that we cannot bring ourselves to face.

However, it’s not only Michael’s choice of murderous and frightening attire that does this to us. In the film’s opening moments, as we’re not quite sure what is going to happen or who we’re going to root for, we’re thrown into this strikingly poignant and perfect first person point-of-view. The constriction of our framework isolates us from the other characters; it slots us into the role of whomever we’re following. And as the sequence progresses, we’re further constricted as we don a mask. Now we’ve become someone else entirely, but whom? As our fears are reinforced because of this, we discover we’re a killer, a murderer; we’re complicit in this cardinal act. We’ve killed our childish fears and desires and brandished the yolk of rage whether we’ve chosen to or not. This, once we’ve discovered who it is we’ve been, sets us forever apart from him; he’s cemented as Other, as fear, as enigma.

What Carpenter so deftly realizes about Halloween that makes it so timeless, is that Michael Myers isn’t much a mere foreboding and terrifying killer because of his unmitigated efficiency, but more because he is a transcendent character, one from not only our nightmares, but from our legends, our most deeply rooted fears. Carpenter made him scary because he made Michael more than a killer while still being just a killer. He created a classic through not buckets of blood and gratuitous violence, but through solid scares, believable characters and settings, and perfect, delectable vision. Carpenter took a joyous and raucous occasion and turned it, in perfect fashion, into pure horror.

Tom Holland’s 1985 cult classic Fright Night wastes little time getting us right into the action. We know from the outset that we’re six-feet deep in some real magical realism, folklore of the campiest kind. We’re in true B-movie territory. That’s ok, though, because that’s what we’ve signed on for. Everything about Fright Night screams generic – the titular next-door bloodsucker, the nefarious fiend likely the foul ghoul, either literally or figuratively; the sinful, meddling teenagers; the melodramatic tone overemphasized through prop and characterization. Blatant foreshadowing clearly acts as set-up throughout, and we immediately know it to be telegraph of future events. Nonetheless, we keep watching because there’s something endearing about Fright Night. What is it?

Charley Brewster, played by William Ragsdale, lives in a stereotypical, quaint suburb on the outskirts of somewhere, and he’s obsessed with the eponymous television show, Fright Night. Hosted by Hammer-style personality and self-proclaimed vampire slayer Peter Vincent, played by Roddy McDowall, Fright Night has not only raucously entertained Charley, but also taught him everything he knows about vampires, and how to slay them. And when the new neighbor, Jerry Dandrige, played by Chris Sarandon, moves in right next door, Charley soon discovers that he might have to put his knowledge to the test.

The stakes begin mildly enough, although not necessarily for Charley; sex with his girlfriend, then out of that, and out of his ADD mentality, the possible dissolution of his romantic relationship. After, the stakes raise themselves again, putting his life in mortal peril before finally raising to the pinnacle: those closest to him have the very real possibility of ceasing to exist or worse, become living dead. His friends have been wooed by the vampire’s seduction, and stand to become minions of the night. From the beginning to end, the tension steadily rises as, with each advance, Charley is met with a resistance that at least partially impedes his progress of discovery and undead destruction.

One of many things Fright Night does right is characterization. Each character acts out his own role with an acute precision that strengthens the vibe, tonality, and voice of the narrative. Despite a few hiccups where players more stumble than fall, all of the portrayed archetypes work in synchronicity as gravediggers at night in a summer storm. There’s the trickster (Evil Ed), the shadow (Jerry Dandrige), the hero (obviously Charley Brewster), the ally (Amy Peterson, Charley’s girlfriend), the herald and mentor (Peter Vincent). They’re all here. None breaks his role; each has his own quirks, his own reservations, his own hopes and fears that bleed out of his performance with the littlest exposition. And when exposition might manifest, it’s never truly heavy handed, but delivered in a fun, interesting, and engaging way.

What works best about Fright Night is that it embraces the vampire and the vampire hunter cliché; it retains full awareness of itself. Why it succeeds is that despite camp, it never once tries to be serious or attain the aura of hard horror. Fright Night never apologizes for itself, but fully embraces the cachet of the horror film, its serial, creepy nature. And even with doing all of this it strikes all the right chords to be equally scary and full of frightful laughs. Even at its most objectively odd moments, Fright Night imbues even its scares with ample laughs and its laughs with ample scares. Never tonally unsure, the way through which narrative is presented unsures the viewer, thus exuding a heavy sentiment of exhilarated unease.

But one can’t talk about Fright Night without talking about its practical effects, score, and more importantly if the movie really means a damn thing at all. Effects such as the pencil through the hand, the crippled, whining, and grotesquely impaled wolf that transforms so ghastly, the carnival-esque, hallucinogenic maws of every vampire, each works so well because each is so unreal, so mechanical in nature that it reverts somehow into some semblance of the real. Our primeval fears are conjured by their visuals; our interests are piqued in their primitiveness. And against the backdrop of a pulsating and haunting diegetic score that ranges from 80’s rave to shrill orchestral, the tonal mesh of both together underpins the oddball, yet charming nature of the film.

However, something seemingly lost in the camp and cult status of Fright Night is the film’s commentary on the state of the vampire, the once regal folklore figure that upon a time pervaded fear, and horror itself – at least at the time, but arguably today as well. Many scenes seem blatantly emblematic of the shock culture prevalent at the time, but underneath rebel against it. Many others are direct rebuttals against it. When Charley survives Jerry’s first attack, his only reaction is to turn on Fright Night, to watch Peter Vincent slay vampires and ghouls; he watches horror films. The transformation of Evil Ed from a vicious wolf back into a naked boy, while horrific and engaging, drags on for a nervous amount of time to not only induce shock, but truly to comment on the amount we can endure before giving up – and Peter Vincent doesn’t, just as we don’t. We’re addicted, perhaps through the auspices of catharsis, to witness the perils of others to forget the perils of our own. Both scenes embody this Faustian principle.

Fright Night not only makes fun of the veritable vampire and his continual nemesis, the vampire hunter, but slasher films, ghost films, monster films, the entire lot. Moreover, it pokes fun at the iterative nature of our fear, the way through which our fears evolve before circling back upon themselves to induce hysteria and mania over and over again. Fright Night stands as a film with a charming, endearing cachet and panache that makes it one of the best vampire films ever imagined in spite of its commentary. Many films have tried to capture its magic, but have miserably failed in their endeavors. Unapologetically 80’s nostalgia all the way, Fright Night was the cool kid’s vampire flick…perhaps it still is.

The soul of horror rests in the haunted house. With little argument to the contrary, almost everyone, including myself, has lived somewhere where the house at the end of the street was haunted. Maybe it was the abandoned elementary school several blocks over. Perhaps it was the derelict convenience store at the edge of town, the scene of a strange and awful murder, where the ghoulish remains of the attendant still wipes windows and fills gas tanks on clear, moonlit nights. Whatever the case, things that go bump in the night, that scream out in terror, or slink about in shadows, lurking, waiting, have a penchant for old, creaky houses.

As a kid, my parents used to take me to haunted houses, all of the carnival type, but scary nonetheless. Of course the gags and frights were ostentatious, melodramatic, and often silly in retrospect, but that didn’t stop me from being terrified. There was one in particular – I can’t recall the name, but only that it was in Gatlinburg, Tennessee – that terrified me more than any other. It reminded me of something… It reminded me of the House on Haunted Hill.

William Castle’s 1959 film finds the eccentric millionaire Frederick Loren, impeccably played by Vincent Price, offering a group of seven disconnected individuals the sum of $10,000 dollars apiece if they can survive one night in the House on Haunted Hill. Of course, a seemingly simple task becomes one of ghastly fright for everyone involved as chandeliers fall, doors slam shut in abyssal basements, ghosts glide about, and the rank stench of murder wafts arrogantly through the chilly, cobwebbed air.

The maniacal, sorrowful, and Poe-esque opening of House on Haunted Hill chills in the most classic, nostalgic of ways. Macabre from the outset, the black humor, led by the King of Grand Guignol himself, quickly supplants itself, setting a bleak, yet entertaining tone for the events to come. Beginning in the vein of a classic, fireside tale of terror, of ghostly goodness, it continues forth never deviating, but continually bolstering its tension and sense of utter, inescapable dread.

The ominous, almost omniscient presence of Vincent Price, the veritable Merchant of Menace, most certainly cannot go without notice here. Delivering some of the best lines, Price waxes Poe-etic within the diegesis created for him. His haunting vernacular behind a silky, yet unmistakably brusque timbre imbues the narrative and its surrounding tonality with a preternatural aura that only Price can attain. House on Haunted Hill exemplifies his mastery of the terrible and terrifying. In so many scenes, especially those fantastic ones in which he and Carol Ohmart quip about killing each other in often shocking ways, Price remains incorrigibly suave, impishly debonair.

Almost every murder that happens in the house throughout the night is alluded to in the beginning minutes. For better or worse, everything is set-up from the outset; the end and demise of each character is telegraphed, yet inherent intrigue overshadows the blatant and often woefully employed foreshadowing. We never truly know if ghosts roams the halls or not, if the haunting is farce or real, but we love it. And while Castle uses odd and often disorienting cinematography to usher unease, House on Haunted Hill is more of an ephemeral fright fest than a visual affair. Although striking when it must be – who doesn’t remember the contorted face of the old woman, gnarled and snarling in the dark – it often finds suspense through mystery, intrigue, and the subversion of logic than pure, unadulterated terror.

With themes of corruption, lust, and any other vice imaginable, with a score of suspenseful chords juxtaposed against shrill staccatos and taught dissonance, House on Haunted Hill stands as film that despite its B-movie makeup, still manages to thrill over 40 years later. It doesn’t help that the version I have is of a grainy, peppery quality, unmastered, one in which all the players are often distorted into grotesque caricatures from time to time. Or maybe it does…it’s spookier that way.

Stanley Kubrik’s 1980 interpretation of Stephen King’s novel The Shining may not be one of King’s favorite adaptations of his work, or the most faithful, but nonetheless it stands as a sarsen of horror, a film revered and inspiring even to this day. The first fifteen minutes, while slightly expository and drawn out, perfectly set-up the narrative that is about to unfold. Through the proprietor’s tales, the stakes for both Jack Torrance, played impeccably by Jack Nicholson, and his family are dramatically and exponentially raised. This beginning is superbly underpinned by the creeping, often psychedelic overture that twines in and out of dread, that not only infuses the audience with immediate unease, but also forebodes the dreadful madness the film pervades. The incessant driving that must end in disaster, but never does, the hallucinations that haunt Danny Torrance, portrayed by Danny Lloyd, Danny’s fainting, and so on, all serve as delayed devastation. Right away we know what may happen – and what most likely will happen – to the doomed, but at first lovely, family.

While Wendy, Jack’s wife portrayed by Shelley Duvall, succeeds in exemplifying a grief stricken, horrified, and increasingly distrusting mother who’s life is quickly spiraling out of control, she never quite escapes both Nicholson and Lloyd who quickly eclipse her performance. The duo acts with an utter believability that pushes the narrative squarely into the realm of reality. Like god and his son, the two are undeniably intermingled, both understand each other more than the other can imagine. Perhaps even through shining, they share thoughts and visions, although this is never explored, but only implied. Nonetheless, their performances embrace this idea; the sheer electricity of their chemistry oozes from each and every scene with such vibrancy that it nearly becomes amusing in its significance. We feel Jack’s madness not only through his actions, but his family’s, and more pointedly, Danny’s reactions or lack thereof.

Austere from the start, Jack, while morally ambiguous, is the inarguably the protagonist of The Shining. And as so, his arc is exquisitely defined. We see deeply into the roiling, confused mind of a deranged man clinging to the cliff’s edge, then falling, then disappearing into the inescapable fog of his own cannibalistic psyche. His id overpowers his ego. He descends into a heart of darkness from which there is no discernable return. His constant fluctuations between sanity and insanity spin the audience to and fro in a whirlwind of emotion. Will he make it? Will he fulfill his prophecy and murder his family? We don’t know and that’s why we watch. We don’t like it and that’s why we watch. We don’t like him…

And Jack’s delusions are so powerful that as the film reaches further into its narrative, as it reaches its point of no return, we begin to doubt ourselves, to doubt what is real, what is imaginary. The anachronisms of his visions, such as the 20’s era party in the right-now, 70’s psychedelics of the Overlook Hotel, further reinforces his mental crumbling, or do they? We’re not sure what to believe in this Faustian examination of the battle between devils and men, for as Jack says, his "soul for a glass of beer..."

The color red proliferates the diegesis of The Shining. There are many positive meanings for the color red: passion, energy, excitement, power, and courage to name a few. But it’s the negative traits associated with the word that more appropriately fit the tone and symbolism of The Shining. Words such as fear, aggression, anger, temptation, ruthlessness, brutality, violence, and rebelliousness all fit within the paradigm built by The Shining. Through almost every scene, this color and these emotions can been seen working in concert to create an allegory of horror that imbeds itself with the collective psyche of the audience.

Red demands our attention. It alerts us. It warns us. It means danger and to look out. Kubrik uses this to his advantage. From the film’s opening moments – the true opening moments where we first meet Jack – red stands as the primary color in almost every scene. Red clothing. Red elevator doors. Red boots. A red phone. Red shirts. Red jackets. Red columns. A red ball. Red darts. Red alarms. A newspaper in the apartment with the bold white words, “The Carter Collapse,” against a bold red background literally refers to politics, but metaphorically refers to the imminent and unavoidable collapse of the Torrance family.

But what if all of this isn’t madness? Yes, I’ve spent this time praising the film for its portrayal of madness, but what if? In Stephen King’s magnum opus, The Dark Tower, he implements the idea of a multiverse to not only the narrative of The Dark Tower, but also to that of his extensive catalog. And in The Shining, if one pays close enough attention, there are clues that the Torrances and the entire cast are a part of this huge, forever encompassing world.

Sure, the film ends with Wendy and Danny escaping Jack, leaving him to freeze to death in the hedge maze. But do we see them reach safety? We only “see” Jack’s fate. Perhaps the Overlook is filled with lost souls from the beginning. Jack and Danny’s visions underpin this alongside the aesthetic and diegesis and the story of the narrative – they all leave, perhaps to their respective heavens and hells. Like Roland in the dark tower, perhaps Jack is a soul that must endure a living hell, one in which he must continually perform the same task throughout eternity, the task of murdering his family or not. Perhaps Wendy and Danny are dead, too. Perhaps they finally, unlike Jack, broke the vicious cycle and have freed themselves.

The Shining is an epic horror film that has seen unprecedented imitators, but none so ingenious as to overtake its shadow. It is a classic that stands the test of years and still holds as much relevance today as it did 33 years ago.

I lied awake in bed, the covers pulled taught to my nose. My nervous eyes flicked around the room, the pitch around me. I was wide-awake, not even a hint of sleep palpable in my mind. My parents had put me to bed early as parents often do, and I was bearish. It wasn’t even late, I opined. It was, at the latest, eight or nine…in the summer at that! They told me not to come into the den, that they were watching a movie, one that wasn’t for children. Naturally, I was more than curious.

After about an hour or so, perhaps longer, I crept out of the bed, opened my bedroom door with painful ease, and tiptoed as a ninja down the hall toward the den. Carefully, I peeked around the corner, my eyes seeming to pop out and creep around like grotesque slugs. My parents sat entranced, in rapt attention. A man, a priest I would later discover, spoke to an odd-looking girl that sat upright on a bed. Her back was turned to the audience, but as I watched, her head slowly began to turn. It didn’t stop. It turned. And turned. From the calluses on my little feet, a terror quickly climbed into my chest and began beating my heart like some tribal drum. Then I saw her gnarled, repugnant face, one full of grotesque malevolence, one turned unnaturally backwards. Her voice issued forth, guttural and fierce. I ran as fast as I could back to my bed. I pulled the covers taught over my head as if crafting an impenetrable shell. I didn’t fall back to sleep…

Of course the film I’m regaling about is William Friedkin’s 1973 film, The Exorcist, one of the most terrifying films on this list of 13 Halloween films to watch before Halloween. Beginning normatively enough as any paranormal film, complete with arcane ciphers, lugubrious priests, and plenty of bumps in the day and night, The Exorcist expertly finds itself as the exalter of all things unease. It quickly escalates into a horrifying spectacle of lost adolescence and the inability to retrieve such an ephemerality.

Not only is Regan MacNeil, played by a young Linda Blair, fighting for her soul, but also for her existence. As she slowly begins to lose control of her body, Regan clings to her old world, to her mother, to things she understands and loves. But, in the early goings, these things manifest themselves as more a monster than the wickedness overtaking her soul. As her mother takes Regan to doctor after doctor, and those learned men perform test after test, there’s a discernible descent into madness, helplessness. The tests in and of themselves are unsettling at least, terrifying at worst.

However, Regan is not the only one at war for their everlasting soul. Father Damian Karras, a priest played by Jason Miller, is also in a struggle for his salvation, and ultimately, his evanescence. As we find him, he is a man embattled with his faith and his secularism, a man of two diametric ideologies that cannot find peace between either. He’s a man that no longer readily believes in the very things he’s poured his life into; he sees a disheveled world around him and cannot accept the contradiction of faith and reality. In fact, he’s lost faith and become unfit to aid those whom he’s given his life to help. He’s become disenfranchised with the policy of faith and god and stands precariously on the precipice battling temptation.

Religious and cultural symbolism abounds in The Exorcist. From the symbol of the cross shadowed across Regan’s head during an x-ray, to the ideals of cultural isolationism posited by scene selection and character development, The Exorcist leaves few stones unturned. There is the search of the lesion on Regan’s brain, but in biblical terms, several demons call themselves legion; what a poignant bit of foreshadowing. Moreover, the biblical parable of demons into swine found in the gospel of Matthew can also be found here. In The Exorcist, the demon inside Regan refers to her as swine on at least one occasion; when Father Karras invokes the demon to possess him and let Regan go, it is a distressing reversal of the parable – swine into man, as opposed to man into swine – even down to the leaping from the cliff, but here a window.

Culturally, The Exorcist showcases the isolation of bodies even when in close proximity. Each character lives in alienation from the others. Regan tied to her bed; the mother grieving, unable to face her fears; the servants doing various, disconnected duties; Father Karras removed from his brethren, his mother, so different from the detective he cannot spare time to see a film with at the cinema. And even at the film’s conclusion – depending on which version one sees – the situation is left bleak. To keep the audience ill at ease, the characters are cast to the wind, removed from each other even more by their now disconnected lives, lives without Regan, without an evil to combat.

While The Exorcist does have a few inconsistencies – such as Linda Blair seeming too old in the film’s early going to play a girl of Regan’s age, and some illogical leaps in judgment for a film steeped in logic – the film delivers on so many levels that these seem mere nitpicks in the scheme of things. With a terrifying and attention grabbing soundtrack, superb dialogue that’s never on-the-nose and rarely expository, but often clever and deft, and a style of cinematography that exudes the unease and tiredness of the film’s characters, The Exorcist shines as an example of near perfect horror.

I at first, in my nascent years, erroneously believed the film to be one that could bring me closer to my misunderstood and terrifying damnation. However, now I understand the film to be a tale of personal discovery, of understanding one’s place amongst gods and men and the creatures in between.